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Uploading the Mind to a Computer

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday March 16 2016, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the ghost-in-the-machine dept.

AnonTechie writes:

While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn. "Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we can all live forever."

It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he says. It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? Itskov doesn't have too much time to find out.

"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," he laments. Death is inevitable - currently at least - because as we get older the cells that make up our bodies lose their ability to repair themselves, making us vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and other age-related conditions that kill about two-thirds of us.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35786771

Horizon: The Immortalist, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC 2 at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later on the BBC iPlayer

Dmitry Itskov, Founder of 2045 Initiative

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 17 2016, @06:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 17 2016, @06:59PM (#319675)

    So very wrong. Lots of nice words though. Your consciousness is physical and as such separate from others merely due to locality. Mind is an abstraction, a part of your system that your consciousness experiences. Copying your current mind out of your body does not move your consciousness out of your body, you will still experience existence from within your original body.

    So a copy of your loved one's mind is not your loved one at all. It is not experiencing anything at all and your loved one is definitely not experiencing anything through it. You might as well talk to your toaster and call it grandmother, you would be equally as wrong.